The Caryatids

Maybe she had fallen, somehow, for their quirky machine translation, for Lucky's native tongue was an obscure pidgin of Chinese, Turkic, and Mongolian dialect, a desert lingo created by the roaming few who still survived in the world's biggest dust bowl. It was the trouble of reaching him, of touching him, that made their pang of communion so precious to her. Talking to Lucky was like shouting through an ancient crack in the Great Wall of China.

She felt a powerful, deeply spiritual rapport with him, for once she had been so much like him: young, bewildered, foreign, aggressive, and heavily armed. In China, yet not quite of China. For this young war hero to become an honored guest of the Chinese state-he must have waded here through a tide of gore.

Sonja disentangled his callused fingers from her curls. "Lucky, you feel some pain here, don't you?" She patted him intimately.

"Yes, that is a pain in my ass."

"I will fix that for you." He'd fallen-from a horse, most likely-and his cracked fourth lumbar vertebra had a growth on it, a tender, frilly, ligamentous benign tumor like some Chinese wood-ear mushroom. People's interior organs-and Sonja had spent years studying them-they were subaquatic organisms, basically. They grew in bloody seawater.

"Stop fixing me, Sonja. You fix me too much."

"Dear Badaulet, that big pain you feel down your leg comes from one small broken bone on your back. It is right...here. Do you feel that? Here it is: that is your pain. Because there is a network of nerves there. The network is pinched, the network has a fault. See how I can touch that network fault? My fingers can feel that."

"No, no! Stop that! My back is strong! It's my stupid ass that has the pain." Lucky twisted his neatly trimmed head, showed her his newly polished teeth and smiled. "Rub me all over, slowly, as you did before. That part is good."

"Lucky: You are strong and beautiful, but I know your body better than you. I know what you feel."

"Stop dreaming! You can't tell me what I feel, woman! Only Heaven knows the secrets hidden in the breasts of men!"

"Oh, I know enough of your secrets to heal you as a man." She lowered her eyes. "That will hurt at first."

"Oh woman, why do you always talk so much? I know what you want from that bold, rude way you look at my face! You can't hurt me! You and your sweet little hands..." Lucky grabbed snakelike at her fingers, and missed them as she instantly snatched them back.

He really didn't think that she could hurt him. Of the many outlandish things that Lucky had said to her, this one was the most absurd.

The Badaulet was an outcast, although he was entirely sure he was a prince. She had once thought she was a princess, and become an outcast..."Badaulet, this evening I will bathe you, and dress you in your fine new uniform. You will meet the greatest heroes in the whole world." Grappling his arm, she coaxed him over onto his belly, so that his spine was exposed.

"Who is that, what did you say to me?" Lucky touched his translation earpiece and frowned.

"Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astronauts! The cosmonauts! The taikong ren. The yuhangyuan. The hang-tianyuan. Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth."

"Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat."

"To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the future!"

"Did your men of valor fight on Mars?"

"No. They collected rocks there."

"Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit."

Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky's spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.

The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish.

"You felt that pang all down your leg, didn't you?"

He was angry. "You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I'm no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt."

Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a little, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right.

What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples..."Lie quiet now...Rest and heal...Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I'll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you 'The Ballad of the Savage Tiger.'"

As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vitality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was irrepressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.